The mystery of my mother's honey cake

My mother was an outstanding baker. Each Thanksgiving, she would create dozens of from-scratch cakes for her 40 or so guests. It always was cake – coconut layer, spice, nut, pound, bourbon, chocolate and so many more – because Mom disdained pies. She thought they were way too much work to feed so few people.


The cakes were legendary in my hometown. At the Halloween carnival, the cake walk suddenly became the most popular attraction when my mother’s cakes were the prize. Any kindness to my family, no matter how small, was swiftly rewarded with a cake. Everyone from the nurses at the hospitals to the teachers at the schools looked forward to them.

In later years, Mom would bake to help out my sisters and me. I once served her cheesecake to a post-bar mitzvah brunch filled with New Yorkers. Several of them told me it was the best cheesecake they ever had tasted. When I took her baked goods to my office – my colleague Glen affectionately dubbed them “Mom cake” – the contest for the last piece almost would result in fisticuffs.

With all of the delicious cakes my mother would bake, each one a work of art, one was arguably more special than all the others. That was the honey cake which made its appearance each fall, near Rosh Hashana.

Once we were grown, my sisters and I would each receive a boot box full of loaf cakes, tenderly wrapped in foil and labeled in Magic Marker on masking tape. (My parents had owned a clothing store, so they seemed to have an endless supply of boxes of every size.) Some would be placed in the bread box for the first of the high holidays and the others would go into the freezer to be retrieved for the Yom Kippur break-the-fast or Succot. If hoarded carefully, there might be, in the very back of the freezer, a slightly misshapen foil rectangle left over for Thanksgiving.

That probably seems surprising to many of my fellow Jews who grew up with honey cakes so dry they could be employed in cleaning up the Gulf Coast oil spill. I’ve tasted that kind of honey cake, thrown together from a recipe in a Sisterhood cookbook somewhere. You have to take a swallow of tea after every bite to keep from choking.

Needless to say, my mother’s honey cake was nothing like that. It was dark and rich and sweet and moist, like the best brownie you ever had but made with honey instead of chocolate. No one really could understand how it could be so good when other honey cakes were so bad. Maybe it was the ultra fresh honey provided by our friends the Yorks from their bee company. Maybe it was the precision with which my mother baked, exactingly smoothing out each cup or measuring spoon. Or maybe it was more spiritual – the cake was the embodiment of my mother’s essential sweet nature.

In 2002, Mom died shortly before Rosh Hashanah. In fact, her shiva, the eight days of mourning, was cut short by the holiday. I had to “get up” from sitting shiva to have time to prepare the festive meals.

My niece Faith and her then fiancé, now husband, Jeff stayed with Marc and me over Rosh Hashana that year. Miraculously, I had found, buried in my freezer, an unused honey cake from the year before. We alternately ate cake and cried during the entire holiday.

When the next year came around, my sisters and I realized that if we wanted Mom’s honey cake, we would have to recreate it ourselves. We looked at every honey cake recipe we had, trying to remember which was the correct one. We searched our memories for every detail -- it had pineapple juice, for example – as we dug through every recipe file she had left us.

Finally, my niece Shayne found my mother’s handwritten recipe among her memorabilia and typed it into an email to send out to everyone. She alerted us to a critical problem, however.

There was a place in the recipe where it was almost impossible to determine whether my mother had written “beat” or “heat.” It was not clear if the problem was her handwriting or an inconveniently placed oil stain, but there was definite confusion on how to achieve the “very thick” state called for in her recipe.

I asked for a fax of the original and studied it like an ancient scroll. I decided that the word was “heat” and proceeded to cook the mixture before then boiling the juice. The result was disastrous. It was more like a lumpy honey pudding than cake. I gave up and found another recipe on the Internet – passable but definitely not my mother’s.

Over the last seven years, one of my sisters found another version of the recipe and determined that beating not heating was the correct way to go. Both of them and Faith have made reasonable facsimiles of the cake.

So, I thought I would try again this year. I’m going to get the freshest honey possible from the farmer who supplies us with eggs so fresh that the yolks are the color of Forsythia in bloom. I’m going to take my time and measure everything with extra care. I’m going to stand over the stove to make sure the cakes don’t overcook and dry to dust. I hope it turns out well.

Yet, I know that it will not be as good my mother’s honey cake. Sometimes a cake, no matter how tasty, is just a lot more than a cake.